Steve Quayle News Alerts

Sept. 30, 2002
By Dean Schabner

Native American activist Eloise Cobell has been fighting a court battle with the U.S. government to get money that has been owed to her family and to 300,000 others for a century.

Government Continues to Lie About Reform of Trust Accounts, Judge Says

When she was a little girl, Eloise Cobell heard her older relatives complaining about how the U.S. government owed them millions of dollars from leases on lands that had been taken from her ancestors, and she wondered if it was true.

When she grew up, she found out it was worse than she ever imagined.

In the late 1800s, the government told Cobell's ancestors they weren't competent to manage their own land and took over control of it, promising to pay the family royalties from the sale of timber, grazing, mineral and oil rights.

The payments came so sporadically, and in such irregular amounts, that Cobell's relatives felt there had to be something wrong with what was going on. Those suspicions seemed to be confirmed by the lack of any accounting statements accompanying the payments, she said.

Her family wasn't alone, either. There are some 300,000 people owed money by the government, and the debt — at least according to Cobell and the legal team that filed suit against the feds in 1996 to get an accounting and restitution — is $137 billion.

The government, though, really doesn't know.

"I grew up with it," Cobell said. "You know when you store something in the back of your mind and you just know that it's wrong? That's the way I was."

A Call for Accountability

In the 115 years since the passage of the Dawes Act, which allowed the government to take over the management of 90 million acres of land belonging to individual American Indians and set up trust accounts for them — the Individual Indian Monies trusts — the records have been lost, destroyed or not kept in the first place.

And when officials in the Department of the Interior were ordered to start taking steps to put the accounts in order and come up with a plan to properly manage the trust funds in the future, they have done next to nothing and then lied about it, according to a federal judge who has found Interior Secretary Gale Norton in contempt of court for her handling of the affair.

"It's really shocking to me that they're so devious and that their behavior is so horrible," Cobell said. "They continue to get away with breaking the spirit of people who are trying to get them to do the right thing.

"My goal is to make the government fix this system," she said. "I want them to be accountable to the people they represent. When corporate corruption happens, everybody's up in arms. If this was a banking situation where other people's money was being mismanaged, people would be off to jail."

‘A Landmark Decision’

Cobell, a 56-year-old member of the Blackfeet nation, began her fight to get the government to put the accounts in order in 1996, when she filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and in the six years the case has been in court the judge has repeatedly ruled for the Indians.

The most recent ruling, on Sept. 17, when U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth called the government's handling of the trust accounts disgraceful and found Norton in contempt, was "a quantum leap forward," for the Indians' cause, said Geoffrey Rempel, an accountant working with Cobell's legal team.

Lamberth said in a 267-page ruling that Norton had failed to comply with his order to resolve the problems in the management of the accounts, and cited four instances in which the Interior Department committed fraud on the court.

"This is really a landmark decision," Rempel said.

He said it was a decisive step towards taking management of the accounts away from the Interior Department and putting them in the hands of an independent manager.

‘An Unfit Trustee for the U.S.’

Lamberth gave the Interior Department until Jan. 6, 2003, to present a workable management plan for the accounts.

The ruling read in part: "The [Interior Department] has indisputably proven to the court, Congress, and the individual Indian beneficiaries that it is either unwilling or unable to administer competently the trust. Worse yet, the department has now undeniably shown that it can no longer be trusted to state accurately the status of trust reform efforts. In short, there is no longer any doubt that the secretary of the interior has been and continues to be an unfit trustee-delegate for the United States."

Justice Department lawyers who are acting as defense for the Interior Department were critical of the ruling and indicated that they may appeal.

"The Department of Justice does not believe that the facts of this case or the applicable law justify a finding of contempt," Assistant Attorney General Robert McCallum said. "We disagree with the court's decision and are evaluating it to consider all of the options for appeal."

The head of the House committee for oversight of the Interior Department and Indian Affairs said the judge's decision did not take into account the state of affairs that Norton faced when she took over the post.

"She inherited a trust management problem that has plagued the federal government for decades," Rep. James Hansen, R-Utah, said following the ruling. "I personally believe this slap from the judge is patently unfair and deliberately disregards her excellent work."

History of Contempt

Norton had assempled a panel of tribal leaders to advise her on how to reform the trust, but those leaders demanded an independent panel be given oversight of the accounts, which the Interior Department did not want to do.

Norton is not the first U.S. official to be found in contempt in the case. Lamberth found Former President Clinton's Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Kevin Gover and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt in 1999.

The court found that under Babbitt and Rubin, the two departments had repeatedly delayed turning over documents, destroyed materials relevant to the case and made misrepresentations to the court during sworn testimony.

Norton has been "at best marginally more responsive than her predecessor," Laberth said in his ruling.

"The judge is not blaming Norton for the state of the trust when she walked in," Rempel said. "What he is saying is that Norton is saying she's reforming the trust when she's doing no such thing."

‘Not Rocket Science’

Even before Cobell began her fight, a special congressional committee found in the late 1980s that oil companies had been colluding to steal money from the trusts since the accounts were set up, and they had done it with the government's knowledge. In 1989 Congress mandated that the accounts be brought into some kind of order.

The accounting firm of Arthur Andersen was brought in in 1991 to look into the records, but the firm said it could not come up with an accounting of the individual trusts because the records were in such bad shape.

The government has spent more than $600 million since 1994, ostensibly on efforts to reform the trusts, Rempel said, but according to the judge's repeated rulings, no progress seems to have been made over that time.

"You have to ask yourself where that money went," he said.

Even after a century of mismanagement of the accounts, Rempel said, it should not be so difficult for the government to come up with an accounting of what is owed to the trust holders.

"At the end of the day, the things that we're talking about are not rocket science," Rempel said. "We're talking about record-keeping and accounting — operations that companies perform every day in the private sector."

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/indian_trust020930.html